Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Get Ready for Your Close-Up

If you’re unnerved by the rapid proliferation of video-surveillance cameras, there’s little you can do when you hit the city streets but slip on a hat or some shades.

Get ready for push back, if a sign I saw this week on the doors of a local bank is any guide. The notice makes a polite request to its urban cool-cat customers to take off face-obscuring accessories when entering to “help us reduce crime.”

Employees said the policy, only a couple weeks old, was a reaction to rising robberies in the neighborhood amid harder economic times. It’s easier for employees to spot troublemakers when most people are barefaced, they say. So far, customers appreciate the need for security and don’t mind.

Expect more such signs in banks — not just to separate potential villains but so they can get a good look at you, too. The new, new thing in bank surveillance is to install cameras near ATMs that capture your mug and check it against a database of customer faces, says Stan Schatt, an analyst following the video surveillance market for ABI Research. The growing embrace of facial-recognition technology reflects the fact that ATMs have become the No. 1 source of fraud losses at banks and are expected to continue to relinquish plenty of money to the wicked in the coming years.

Banks aren’t the only big users of cutting-edge video surveillance technology. Energetic buying by large retailers and government agencies helped raise sales of video-surveillance gear 12 percent, to $17.7 billion, in 2008, according Schatt’s research. He’s expecting a similar brisk growth pace this year, despite the recession.

One big buyer may be my own fair city. As my colleague Al Baker reported on Wednesday, the New York Police Department is laying plans for an immense surveillance system covering both Midtown and Lower Manhattan that would involve the monitoring of thousands of public and private security cameras at a single coordination center. It’s unclear what role facial-recognition software might play in the scheme.

But, joining the howl of privacy advocates, I can already hear the city’s fashionable citizens scream: “I refuse to de-accessorize!”

Banking customers have zero expectation of privacy…well, actually it’s a negative expectation of privacy. Who’d keep their money in a bank that didn’t diligently check IDs, signature cards, and PIN codes before handing out cash? And with every transaction diligently documented and accounted for, the only folks with genuine anonymity in a bank these days are identity thieves. That is until now…

What's Next

About

Gadgetwise is a blog about everything related to buying and using tech products. From figuring out which gadget to buy and how to get the best deal on it to configuring it once it’s out of the box, Gadgetwise offers a mix of information, analysis and opinion to help you get the most out of your personal tech.